The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (4 page)

“Not in hospital,” he was finally able to decipher.

He drew a breath. He exhaled slowly while pressing his fingers to his temples, exactly as indicated by an Eastern relaxation technique. Obviously, before Marlow Craftsman went to the police, he had called every single hospital in Spain, with the help of two secretaries at his publishing house, two women whom he swore to secrecy about the investigation. They had found nothing. They had also called police stations, prisons, hotels, and other public places he imagined might give some clue as to the whereabouts of his son. To no avail. Later he checked that Atticus hadn't hired a car or a yacht, hadn't taken a flight, a train, or a ferry. One of
the secretaries suggested checking campsites as well, but Marlow assured her that the only reason his son would be found in one of those odious places was if he had been kidnapped, and that would move their little investigation up to a new level, one for which they would need to seek professional assistance.

Following the logic of this argument, Marlow had gone with Charles Bestman, his right-hand man, to Scotland Yard, where a friendly police inspector had insisted on transferring the dossier to Spain because, he said, “Missing person cases are best dealt with in situ.”

Mr. Bestman spoke perfect English, French, German, and Spanish, so he would easily be able to act as interpreter.

•  •  •

Charles Bestman was also startled when the telephone rang after ten o'clock at his home in Chelsea Gardens. He was already in his pajamas. He checked the time on the grandfather clock in the living room. It was never wrong. It had belonged to his own grandfather and had survived air raids, the division of family inheritances, and other domestic disasters, yet continued to give the time with perfect accuracy.

“Darling, who on earth could be calling at this time?” his wife, Victoria, asked from the dressing room.

Charles lifted the receiver. He listened in silence.

On the other end of the line he heard voices, the clinking of glasses, background music. He listened more carefully. His pulse accelerated. If the young Craftsman had been kidnapped, as he suspected, then sooner or later he would get the dreaded call demanding a ransom. “For the moment, the hostage is well,” they would tell him, “but if you don't pay us immediately we'll cut off
his ear. Bring us the money in a suitcase, don't tell the police.” Then they would give him directions to a bit of disused land on the edge of the city, tell him not to take any weapons, not to pull any tricks. And then, worst of all, he would have to give Marlow Craftsman the bad news.

“Who is it?” he asked after a few suspenseful seconds.

Nothing.

He put a finger in his right ear and pressed the telephone to his left. The voices were speaking Spanish. There was no doubt that it concerned the kidnapping of Atticus Craftsman.

“Hello?”

He was able to make out a phrase over all the noise. He didn't recognize the voice of the person speaking, but he understood straightaway that it was someone connected with the police.

“And you're sure it's not something to do with drugs?” he heard the man say.

He heard the echoing sound of a bottle being uncorked, followed by the gurgling of the liquid as it was poured into a glass.

“Manchego, you've left your phone on,” said a third person.

“Your turn to deal, Macita, get on with it,” he heard Inspector Manchego say, then the call ended.

CHAPTER 6

W
herever he went, Atticus Craftsman was in the habit of carrying his small collection of erotic books with him. They were five volumes bound in red leather with no names printed on their spines. They weren't very large editions, taking up about the same amount of space as his wash bag. They contained no prologues, introductions, footnotes, or indexes of names or dates—just naked text, no more no less.

That was, really, his only perversion. He had never watched a pornographic film, never bought a dirty magazine, and he didn't like looking at websites with sexual content. He wasn't depraved or into weird stuff. However, he inexplicably felt unable to go anywhere without his small traveling library.

Wrapped in tissue paper, those five books were the first things he took out of his suitcase as soon as he closed the door to his room behind the hotel porter. He placed them on the bedside table, in strictly alphabetical order as usual, moving the phone and the lamp slightly to one side: Duras, Lawrence, Miller, Nabokov, and Sade. Five ways of understanding female sensuality.

•  •  •

“You can't learn that stuff from books,” Lisbeth had warned him on one of their secret nights in Tolkien's room. “They're just fantasies that have come out of the dirty minds of authors. They've got nothing to do with reality.”

Atticus had rescued each of the books from oblivion. At some point, one of his relatives, male or female, had acquired, read, and hidden them among the thousands of books in the library in Kent. What better place to bury a guilty conscience? The strange thing was that all five of them were exactly the same size, were printed on the same paper, as fine as cigarette paper, and had the same impeccable binding. Perhaps they had all been a single, exciting gift for who knows who.

The fact is that they had finally ended up in his hands. Almost by chance.

Lolita
was the first. He found it one rainy Sunday afternoon when the pain in his knee was still unbearable, and it served as a comfort. It distracted his mind, relaxed his body, and filled his dreams with shameful scenes in which Lolita had Lisbeth's face. Then came
The Lover
, more torturous, more violent, turning some of his dreams into nightmares.

It was then that he realized the two books were exactly the same size and style. He hitched himself up with the crutches, hobbled over to the shelves as best he could, and pored over them, from right to left, until one by one, like red fireflies, the other three novels jumped out at him. Lisbeth said that you couldn't learn how to love from books, but she moaned and contorted her small, satisfied body thanks to Miller and Nabokov, believing all the while that Atticus was responsible for such delirium.

The tale of the young Craftsman's skill in the bedroom spread like wildfire through the corridors of the all-female colleges. His fame soon became legend. Women sought his gaze, followed him through darkened side streets, pressed him into corners, devoured him. On one occasion, a young student asked him, with all the seriousness in the world, to make love to her in his rowboat. They navigated the Thames by night, moving back and forth to the rhythm of the oars.

He said nothing to Lisbeth about those occasional amorous encounters. After all, she was the one who most benefited from all the new experience he was gaining.

At the end of his third year, Atticus could have written his own erotic novel with a combination of what he had learned from books and discovered in real life. That he didn't was out of respect to Tolkien. The ghost of the old professor attended each and every one of those lessons in love in absolute silence, without ever frightening the pupil's many teachers. Tolkien may have been wide-eyed with surprise, but his respectful tolerance made him, for better or worse, a secret accomplice. It would have been improper to tell the world about Tolkien's voyeuristic tendencies.

•  •  •

Once he had unpacked the books, Atticus removed a small electric kettle from his suitcase. It was a pain to take it everywhere, but it was worse to have to wait for room service to bring him hot water. He needed a cup of tea every forty minutes; he had it calculated down to the second.

He always traveled with two or three boxes of Earl Grey, even though people assured him you could buy it in most countries, because he was truly terrified by the idea of ending up without
his cure-all remedy. This wasn't a new habit. He'd arrived at Eton a frail thirteen-year-old boy, constantly struck down by flu, headaches, and poor digestion. He was lucky enough to fall into the hands of Dr. Hamans, who hailed from the Netherlands and was writing a thesis on the curative properties of herbal infusions. He adopted Atticus as a guinea pig and managed with Earl Grey what no one had with conventional medicine: He transformed the fragile boy into a mighty oak. If Atticus had a stomachache, he prescribed a cup of hot tea. If his head ached, the prescription was for cold tea; if he fell playing cricket and scraped his skin, a squirt of tea on some cotton wool was enough to clean the wound; if he got a fever, compresses soaked in Earl Grey would bring his temperature down. The treatment worked with astounding efficiency. Atticus grew thirty centimeters during the five years of his secondary education, didn't fall ill once, was chosen as captain of the cricket team, and was top of the class in six subjects.

Hamans wanted to study the case in depth at a medical school in London with a grant from Twinings, but Marlow refused to let his son be used as a lab rat. In the end, he allowed him to donate only a few blood and tissue samples, which, unfortunately, Hamans studied furiously for months without obtaining any conclusive results. Atticus, meanwhile, remained convinced that tea cured everything and developed an addiction to Earl Grey that was more psychological than physical. He decided to take his kettle everywhere, just as some women travel with their hair dryers.

Alone in his room, he plugged in the appliance, filled it with water, waited until the light came on, and then cursed himself for having packed in such a rush, with four pints inside him and his head all over the place. He had forgotten the mug.
His
mug.

He wasn't an obsessive. Nor a fetishist. But he felt the same devotion to that mug that other people feel toward their pets. The mug was called Aloysius, in honor of Sebastian Flyte's teddy bear in
Brideshead Revisited
, and Atticus had gotten an artist in Kensington to stamp the name in black letters on the white porcelain. He took a glass out of the small cupboard that housed the minibar. He poured boiling water over the tea bag. The glass steamed up. How irritating. He burned the tips of his fingers when he touched it.

Then he unpacked the rest of his luggage: three business suits, six made-to-measure shirts, three pairs of wool socks, six pairs of Ralph Lauren boxer shorts, two belts, a Burberry overcoat that would be completely useless judging by the May sunshine, two pairs of Italian shoes, a scarf—how absurd—his cuff links in their box, six linen handkerchiefs, four ties (all striped), and his wash bag, which contained his cologne, shaving foam, mouthwash, and dental floss.

At the bottom of his suitcase, folded in two, was his old pillow, his traveling companion since he was seven years old, patched, threadbare, its stuffing almost all gone. It was very clean, though, with a faint and pleasant scent of soap. He quite literally couldn't live without it.

The only time he was unfaithful and was forced to sleep on a disgusting pillow in the bed of one of his occasional lovers, he suffered the consequences in the form of severe muscle strain—which was relieved only by hot tea compresses and the loving care administered by the nice girl to whom the pillow belonged.

He placed his pillow on top of the hotel's. On the pillowcase, in large red letters, was embroidered
PROPERTY OF ATTICUS CRAFTSMAN
and the telephone number of his parents' house,
which, fortunately, hadn't changed in the last twenty-three years. It wasn't an eccentricity, as he explained to the surprised women who had shared it with him; the pillow was quite simply a question of health.

He took a look around the luxurious room of his Madrid hotel. It was large and light, classic and airy. It had two windows that looked out over a wide avenue lined with chestnut trees. It was two in the afternoon on a sunny Sunday in late May. His stomach demanded a sandwich, preferably smoked salmon and cream cheese with herbs. He asked himself if it would be possible to find such a delicacy in Madrid, in addition to the shade of a tree in a green space resembling Hyde Park under which to eat said sandwich.